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Sony Encourages Linux On Their Phones
neokushan writes "Sony has been in the news a lot lately — from the PSN downtime and the identity theft issue that came with it, to the numerous court cases launched to try and quell the PS3 hacking scene. It may come as a surprise to many, then, that Sony's mobile smartphone division has taken an almost polar-opposite approach — they're actively encouraging developers to create, modify and install customized Linux kernels into their latest lineup of phones, including the Xperia Play, the device that was once known as the 'PlayStation Phone.'"
It was called OtherOS. Never again...
Perhaps you should make up your own mind. This is just information. It's not a decision.
Most vendors publish (some) of the necessary drivers. However in truly incompetent fashion, they do so by dropping the kernel sources they used for the device. No history, no upstream contribution, just a tarball.
This attitude is heavily encouraged by Google forking permanently from the mainline and not maintaining an upstream of its own, resulting in tons of dead-end drivers for these devices that have to be reworked between Android versions. On top of that, you have the problem that userspace drivers for most video chips are built against Bionic, rendering them unusable on non-Android platforms. This leaves you stuck with software-only for video and no 3D at all.
Sadly there's no guarantee that MeeGo will free us from that, but at least using glibc/Xorg (and eventually Wayland) means that ports of other OSes with full hardware support (including 3D) is more likely, as opposed to now where it's either second-rate via chroot+vnc or software rendering only.